Airbnb

Problem

While Airbnb has expanded beyond its core audience of budget travelers, its user experience does not cater for the travelers varied trip behavior.

Solution

By adding search parameters, personalized sorting and contextual recommendations, the new Airbnb mobile app can cater the varied discovery processes of travelers.

Mobile App Design

Duration: Jan 2018 - Feb 2018 | Team: Individual Design Project | Contribution: User research, Feature conceptualization, Wireframing, Prototyping

Search By Dates

The date selection has to be explicit in order to eliminate the frustration of most travelers who have trip dates before they head to Airbnb to search for listings.

To maintain the explorative search style that caters for the wanderer travelers, the new search bar maintains the “Anytime” search.

Search By Neighborhood

Travelers usually face a plethora of choices when deciding where to live and what to do on Airbnb. They want to live in certain types of houses, be close to certain landmarks, or live in certain neighborhoods.

The challenge is that travelers do not know the atmosphere and experience of each neighborhood, and yet they are limited to searching neighborhood name to find listings close to there. So they crawl through different online sources just to find the name of the area they want to stay.

Instead of searching for specific names of neighborhoods, traveler should search for descriptors that fits the atmosphere and feeling of the area they want to live in.

Because of the long list of descriptors available, instead of a normal list, a dropdown menu is preferable to keep the filter options concise and accessible in just one flick.

The lesser known search trick is that travelers can also search directly for neighborhoods, streets and landmarks. However, the help text on the search bar only shows cities, hence prompting travelers to only search for cities.

By providing explicit hints in the search bar and search page, travelers who knows the neighborhoods they want to explore can just type the neighborhoods name in search, saving effort in narrowing down the search scope on the map.

Sorting Results

To find a place that has the highest rating or lowest price, while fitting all the traveler’s preferences, is hard, and often times involves scrolling through the entire list of results.

During the user testing, the sorting icons and dropdown menu are the most receptive among the users. However, the sorting icons are not coherent with the rest of the UI design. Therefore the dropdown menu is chosen to be implemented.

Travelers can choose to sort the results by price (low to high) or rating (high to low) in addition to the wide range of filters available to customize their results.

Neighborhood Recommendation

Cities are organized in neighborhoods. Travelers usually explore by neighborhoods. But they don’t know where to go if they didn’t do extensive research of the city. Neighborhood cards are a way to introduce travelers with less plans new neighborhoods that they can explore.

Neighborhood Cards are vignettes that travelers peak into different neighborhood. We experimented with different designs and found that the 3rd iteration provides the most appealing and informational description of the neighborhood. It takes inspiration from the header of the Airbnb experience pages.

Neighborhood page highlights elements that make the neighborhood unique. Mission District in San Francisco is famous for their intersection between hispanic and urban culture. So its Neighborhood Page shows a curated list of experiences that explores the diverse culture Mission has to offer.

The outcome is that travelers with less planning can still explore the city like a local and go to neighborhoods that they may not be discover otherwise, instead of looking through a long list of results.

Location-based Homescreen

While Airbnb’s homescreen is designed for travelers to explore destinations to go to, they want to know what to do nearby when they are traveling. But when they open the app, this shows up…

The homescreen doesn’t show anything near to the traveler. And when she searches the location, there are groups of activities categorized by type, but also nothing close to her, or things she may be interested in.

The homescreen should be customized to the location the traveler is at. In it there should be listings near the traveler’s location that are highly rated, or fits the preferences of her based on search/browsing history. Neighborhood search and neighborhood recommendation are included to provide more local suggestions and results for the traveler.

The lesser known search trick is that travelers can also search directly for neighborhoods, streets and landmarks. However, the help text on the search bar only shows cities, hence prompting travelers to only search for cities.